Strictures At An Exhibition

Art Art review

Big Works Crowd Small Gallery

Boy, are those folks at the Orlando Museum of Art shrewd. Here they are, hoping to build an addition to the museum and they install a show of big works in a small gallery.

Not just any large art, either. The gallery is tastefully filled with ''New Decorative Works'' from the local Norma and William Roth Collection - big, colorful, exuberant paintings and fabrics that whet the appetite for more.

Alas, if only the museum had the room . . .

Curator and exhibition designer Hansen Mulford has handled the challenge admirably. The one work that really deserves some room, Miriam Schapiro's resplendent ''Azerbajani Fan'' (1980), occupies a panel at the gallery entrance. First seen at a distance through a corridor, it invites the viewer to approach and look closer.

The cozy quarters also encourage the viewer to inspect other works of the ''new decorative'' or ''pattern painting'' movement, mostly from the 1970s. The movement has often been regarded as a rejection of both pristine minimalism, then in vogue, and of the excesses of abstract expressionism, then on the wane.

The surprise is the degree to which a sort of painterly insouciance pervades. For instance, Tony Robbin's untitled canvas of 1976, viewed from as great a distance as you can manage in the gallery, seems a rigorously controlled composition of overlapping matri ces on a background of bright and pastel colors. Close inspection, however, betrays the painter's hand. The line segments are obviously painted, maybe poured, with occasional waves and irregularities.

Robert Zakanitch's ''Molasses'' (1980) consists of a sloppy grid of brown splotches and blue or turquoise interstices, dotted with messy swirls of paint approximating flowers. A lighter palette animates his triptych ''Spring Fever'' (1976), which presents a V-like vine supporting bright flowers. Both the colors and the style recall Matisse. The same might be said of Brad Davis' appealing ''Young Crane'' (1979), loosely painted and framed by a patterned fabric border.

The interlocking patterns of Valerie Jaudon's ''Tatum Lake'' (1977) recall Islamic patterning, albeit without color. The white lines of the pattern are negative spaces of clear ground on bare canvas, defined by tight little blocks of black paint. Again, a closer look reveals the painter at work - Jaudon's brushwork is evident.

Most of these pieces represent a defiant celebration of what the art world once scorned (and in some quarters still scorns) as ''mere decoration.'' Past artists of indisputable accomplishment have on occasion been dismissed with this contempt, but usually it is reserved for ethnic crafts, folk art and what was once regarded as ''women's work.'' Hence we have Kim MacConnel's ''Bandit'' (1978) (did the artist want to cast the work as an aesthetic outlaw?), which consists of alternately broad and narrow strips of expres sively painted fabric. The work's clear antecedent is the quilt.

Yet some artists of the decorative movement sought deeper roots. A flat-mounted cloak from Schapiro's ''Vestiture'' series (1978) reminds the viewer that brightly colored, intricate patterns once denoted the wearer's power or significance, lifting that person from the preindustrial world of dirt and pestilence. The complications of the technological age made minimalism's austerity appealing, but Schapiro recalls a simpler moment when decoration signified mystical power and control over little-understood forces.

Which returns us to her ''Azerbajani Fan,'' in which strings of beads outline black spokes ema nating from a floral core. Zigzag patterns cross behind the spokes. Floral patterns here and there violate the beaded borders and spread over the black spaces. On one level, the fan is simply a delightful decoration, but on others it evokes tensions between order and profusion, between rules and license, between void and superfluity. It's a remarkable accomplishment.

Sadly, there's too little of this show. It includes just enough to cover the major concerns of the movement, and the close surroundings work in its favor, but it falls short of an inclusive, scholarly overview. Nonetheless, it's an appealing, small show with the reward of intimacy a larger installation would lack.